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Gradually the whale reached the surface, and remained perfectly quiet on the water; but, suddenly, as if goaded by some fiercer pang, he started from his lethargy into exertion with augmented power. Tossing and plunging like a maddened devil on the chafing sea, and spouting the water from his vast spiracle with a din that almost deafened us, he made a leap towards the boat, then shot perpendicularly downward, hurling the helmsman over the quarter as he struck and shattered to atoms the long steering oar in his descent. With his head forward, just upon the flukes of the whale as he vanished, the unhappy seaman fell; and, drawn by the suction of the closing waters as if he had been a feather, sank; but, although carried to a considerable depth as we conjectured from the lapse of time he remained under water, he came up, and was dragged, quite exhausted, on board by his comrades.

"Coil after coil, more than 200 fathoms of the line went over, spinning through the chocks with a force that returned in steam the water thrown on the boat's gunwale, and still with the speed of a cannon-ball the great creature bored its downward way. Three flakes remained in the tub. 'Cut!' cried the mate; 'cut quick, or we shall be carried down!' Scarcely had the officer given utterance to this command than the knife of the boatswain was applied to the heated strands; but the hissing line flew with tripled velocity through the smoking wood, and jerked the blade from its handle. At the moment when the boat rose on end, and the bows were half buried in the surge, the whizzing cord-unexpected mercy! -lost its tension, and our frail bark, almost filled with water, fell back and righted to a level keel. For an escape so miraculous every heart beat with gratitude. Returning upward by compulsion, for the purpose of respiration, the immense fish showed that, exhausted by his exertions and overpowered by his wounds, life was almost at an end; but, as if by the final spasm of departing strength, or by the wondrous impulse of his ascent, his gigantic frame shot twenty feet above the surface of the sea. Before we had finished bailing out our sinking boat, he darted away again with redoubled vigour. Severing the opposing water as if it were nothing more than air, we were dragged along for half a mile, when our game brought to abruptly, as if paralized, and,

"Lay around, my lads, and let us set on him!' cried the mate; his spirit is broken at last.'

"Spade and lance were needless now, for the work was done; and the dying animal, struggling in a whirlpool of bloody foam, tinged the ocean far around with the dye of crimson.

"Stern all!' shouted the mate, as the whale began, in the strong spasms of dissolution, to turn round impetuously in a circle, beating and lashing the water with his head and flukes, while with a crashing sound his teeth were smitten furiously into their sockets. 'Stern all, or we are shivered to bits!' As the command was given, rising in a large spout above the half-seen form of the expiring brute, a stream of black clotted gore fell in a shower and drenched us with blood.

"There! thick as pitch! Stern every soul! -he's going in his flurry!'

“In the convulsions of the final paroxysm, the monster tossed his huge tail into the air, and for the space of some minutes beat the water right and left with powerful and most rapid blows the concussions sounding like the discharge of heavy ordnance. Heavily and slowly then he turned on one side, and

stretched a dead mass on the sea-the bubbles as they oozed from under his carcass, and burst with a slight hollow noise, being the sole signs of so lately furious a contest.

"He's fin up at last!' screamed the mate, at the top of his lungs.

"Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!' we all shouted; and the mate, as well as several of the crew, taking off their caps, sent them flying aloft into the air, at the same time jumping from thwart to thwart like maniacs. I leaped on the whale's back, and planted a wafe-pole deep in the flesh, then looked up with a warm gush of delight at the little canvas flag waving at the top, and telling the captain the importance of our prize. To splice some tackle on the whale was the labour of ten minutes.

taking advantage of a breeze that had now sprung up, the ship stood towards us; and soon lying to brought us close under her stern. This whale, your honour, was the largest we caught during that trip; for he measured more

than eighty feet from his noddle to the tip of his flukes."

Jack Thorpe was silent. He had reeled off his yarn for the sixth time-being the sum, in decades, of his own years.

"NOTHING SO difficult as a beginning," wrote Byron of poetry. Perfectly true of that, and equally so of many other mundane matters. Take a speech, for example. Many a man can rattle away with tolerable fluency when once he has started his address; but nine speakers out of ten blunder and stammer, or pause and repeat their words, at the commencement. Take skating: how easily that gentleman in the tights and gaiters, with the right arm and the left leg elevated—

"Like Mercury, new lighted on a heav'n-kissing hill,"

glides over the polished ice-floor of the Serpentine. But if you had seen him at the moment when the skates were first adjusted to his feet, on this the first day of skating this season, and watched how cautiously he balanced himself gradually up to the perpendicular, not quite certain whether he was "all right," though assured so by his obsequious attendant, you would not have expected to see him five minutes afterwards executing pas more graceful than those of Carlotta Grisi, and skimming along more rapidly than swift Camilla over the unbending corn. Take fighting: with every sentiment of respect and admiration for our glorious heroes in the Crimea, and without the slightest detraction from their courage, I will venture to assert positively that not one of them entered on his first battle without a strong palpitation of the heart and a catching of the breath, that might be mistaken for fear, but was nothing at all but the natural and universal nervousness attending a "beginning;" and five minutes afterwards, when shots and shells were flying, and swords and bayonets clashing, not a particle of that nervousness remained, but the steady beating of the stout hearts that quailed not before death itself. Take-in short, take anything by way of an example, and you will find it a fitting one of the truth that there is nothing so difficult as a beginning, or, as the French say, " Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte."

VOL. VI. N.S.

This was the grand difficulty experienced by Mr. Grimsby Grounsell in a more tender matter than any of those I have referred tonamely, courtship. He was what mammas with full-grown daughters call a "marrying man," and an eligible one; which being translated means, that Mr. Grimsby Grounsell was extremely soft-hearted in regard to female attractions, and possessed a very comfortable little independence. Moreover, he had reached an age when a man is supposed to have sown his wild oats. As a general rule, a greater mistake than this same supposition can scarcely be made with respect to middle-aged bachelors. They never leave off sowing till they leave off living. At forty a man does not wrench off door-knockers, punch the heads of policemen, drive tandems in Regent Street, light cigars with five-pound-notes, and appear before the eyes of his female relations and friends in an opera-box, seated beside a young lady with more rouge and pearl-powder than correctness of morals or steadiness of demeanour. These are the little eccentricities of twenty; but at the age when waistcoats have to be enlarged, and Cartwright and Truefitt have entire charge of teeth and hair, these follies are shunned with horror by the man who committed them twenty years ago. Not that they have become more moral, but more careful of appearances; not that they love virtue better than of yore, but that they respect the world and the world's opinion. Look into those gentlemen's hearts, and you will see the same sins lurking in the chambers of them; and the wild oats have yielded a black and rusty crop, and the seeds thereof are only gathered to be resown in darkness, and each fresh yield is worse than the last. Don't you know all this, gentle reader? If of the sterner sex, you certainly do; and if of the gentler, God forbid that we should tell you more than the bare fact that middle-aged bachelors are no better than young ones or rather that they are worse, from having twenty years more of sin weighing on their shoulders, and cankering their hearts.

E

There are great exceptions to every rule, and Mr. Grimsby Grounsell was a bright one to that which we have laid down concerning the morals of the middle-aged. Indeed, were there not exceptions, and were we not perfectly sure that all our own friends would class themselves among them, we should never venture to publish what we have above written, except anonymously. As it is, our mind is at ease on the subject. Every one will point to his neighbour as one of the examples of the rule, and write himself among the exceptions.

Mr. Grounsell was a moral man, and one that wished to be married and settled. He felt that matrimony alone could render him happy, and he ardently longed to hug its chains. But the beginning! How was he to plunge into courtship? Or rather, how was he to walk quietly step by step into it ?-for plunging is quite a different matter. If a man could throw himself headlong at a young lady, as some people wish that Lord Raglan and General Canrobert would fling themselves against Sebastopol, Grimsby Grounsell might have summoned the courage to do it; but he felt that it was impossible to carry a lady's heart by a coup de main. He was a modest man-a bashful man-a man who had been a "wallflower" at evening parties in his younger days, and who scarcely ever got beyond the purloining of a rosebud from his partner's bouquet, while other men would have been on the road to Gretna Green with her at the same moment. He heaved the first sigh when he should have been snatching the first But

really, my fair reader, I was quite forgetting that you know nothing about such things. Nevertheless, I dare say you have often had for partner at a ball or a picnic a man who was shy and awkward, and spoke little, or talked about the weather, and hoped you would not take cold, and asked you whether you liked dancing, and tried a compliment which broke down in the middle, and frightened him so much that he could not speak at all for five minutes afterwards, and was apt to get out of time in a polka, and never attempted a waltz, and whom you heartily wished at Jericho, after trying all in your power to draw him out and make him feel at his ease in vain. When you got home, and counted your partners, and considered what kind of men they were, you passed this one over with a shudder, or a shrug of the shoulders, or a smile of contempt, or a little exclamation of " the wretch!" And then you turned with a little flutter of the heart to young Davenport of the Blues, with his gay, saucy, easy bearing, and his beautiful mous

tache; or to that dear, charming, elegant Mr. Violet, so lately returned from Paris, and so delightfully fluent in his descriptions of foreign scenes and foreign courts; or again to that exceedingly amusing Mr. Tattle, who has a fund of such clever, piquant, and slightly scandalous anecdotes to tell about everybody, from an empress to the last new bride and bridegroom of St. George's, Hanover Square.

And yet, perchance, all the while that you were thus thinking or dreaming, your good mother, with your true worldly interests nearest to her heart, was cogitating the advantages of a matrimonial alliance between yourself and "the wretch;" or, still more likely, the wretch was himself tossing about in his bed, haunted by the ever-present vision of your pretty self, and wishing he had only been able to say a few words easily and naturally to you, so as to have gained one genuine smile of satisfaction in return. And possibly he was better worth thus rewarding than Davenport of the Blues, or Violet of Paris, or Tattle of everywhere. These gentlemen slept soundly enough, and thought no more of you than of a hundred other women whom they saw every night, talked nonsense to, and forgot next day.

Poor Grimsby Grounsell had passed through twenty years of his life a young lady's "wretch." He had felt the tender passion nascent in his bosom a dozen times; but before he could summon courage to give the very faintest expression of it, the object had vanished from his sight-carried off by a more daring, if not a worthier man; and he found himself, ætatis forty, still a bachelor, but with an untouched heap of love in his bosom sufficient to furnish forth half-a-dozen of the fondest of husbands.

He had made several attempts at a beginning several spasmodic efforts to break the ice of conventionality crusting over the well of deep feeling which he innocently believed to exist in the bosom of every pretty and agreeable woman he met. But, alas! he always broke down himself before he succeeded in breaking the ice. It must be observed, however, that he never tried a widow, or the result might have been different.

Almost the first of Mr. Grimsby Grounsell's cases of attachment was to Fanny Brinsley, one of the most delightful little brunettes the world ever saw. Mr. Grounsell was then in his days of youth, and a "wallflower." He first saw Fanny at an evening party close to Portman Square. The sight was enough for him. Already his heart beat with tenfold its